


Safe in the Dark

by vials



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Angst, College era, Gen, Tim's life sucks and Brian is a bro I guess, probably some time after Tim and Brian initially auditioned, the Operator is there if you squint, which is pretty relevant considering that's how it goes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28661085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vials/pseuds/vials
Summary: Tim is growing sicker, and it's getting harder to hide.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Safe in the Dark

The headache began out of nowhere.

There were a few things that Tim told himself it could be. He had chosen, for example, to sit at the side of the classroom and right next to a large window, and while the sun wasn’t yet on that side of the building he did briefly consider heat stroke as a possible source. Failing that, there was a chance he hadn’t been drinking enough water that day, and it was hot and humid outside even if the classroom was nicely air-conditioned. For all he knew, he could have caught the heat walking from his car into the building, and even though he walked the same brief route most days without hassle, he still had to consider that as an option. Any other possibility didn’t bear thinking about, so Tim refused to think about it.

The pain started as a dull pressure, something that he could barely call pain at all. It simply felt as though there was a large weight on the top of his head, pressing down with increasing force as the minutes ticked by. Tim stole glances at the clock, but when it came to clockwatching his professor was somewhat of a sadist, and the clock was positioned on the wall behind the students. Easy to see from the professor’s perspective, but incredibly conspicuous when a student wished to check the time, and doubly so when the movement was increasingly excruciating. According to the clock, Tim had forty-five minutes left of this class, and it left him with something of a dilemma. He could excuse himself and deal with the stares and the questions, the constant undercurrent of thought – _he’s not_ normal _, that one_ – and make it home before the headache got to be as bad as it was promising, or he could continue attempting to tell himself that rapidly sipping water would help him, and try and make it to the end of class. He knew what the sensible decision would be, but that only applied if it was one of _those_ headaches, and Tim just didn’t think it could be.

Headaches always came with visuals. Tim couldn’t remember when he had started doing it, but he had always had an image of the pain in his mind’s eye, a pattern that corresponded. Right now he could picture the top of his head as crushed completely flat by the pressure, and now the pain was beginning to spread through it like the scars left from a lightning strike: bright white, stretching fingers out in fissures. It was impossible to concentrate upon anything else. The noise of the classroom somehow receded into the background and yet became excruciatingly loud; the lights above him, seeming so dim before, now shone down like tiny suns. Tim realised he was gripping his pen so hard his knuckles had gone white, and he had been pressing the nib down on the page with some force. Later he would realise the ink had soaked through five or six pages, and the indentation from the pen double that.

With extreme effort, Tim loosened his grip on the pen. It seemed to happen bit by bit, the relaxing of tendons, the loosening of muscles, the physical effort of lifting the pen and placing it down on the surface of the desk. He did so gently, but the sound of the pen laying flat lanced through his temple as surely as though somebody had cracked him around the head with something sharp. Tim resisted the urge to press or touch at his temple, knowing it would only end in more pain. Slowly, painstakingly, Tim twisted in his seat, fraction by fraction, until he could see the clock out of one watering eye. Somehow there was still forty minutes left of the class.

“Are you in a hurry, there, Tim?” his professor asked.

Tim fought the urge to groan. Now he was somehow going to have to coordinate a response – Chris was a good guy, really, one of those teachers who didn’t pry much but seemed to understand when something was afoot anyway. He didn’t think it odd when Tim’s essays landed in his inbox at three in the morning; he had forgiven a couple of late assignments that Tim had genuinely forgotten about, letting him make them up later. He was a bit of a sticker for the time, disliking his students constantly clockwatching, but he was never an asshole about it. Even now he wasn’t singling Tim out for any reasons of sadistic glee, like how a high school teacher might draw attention to a pupil. It was probably a genuine question, or at the very least Chris had noticed he was moving around like a man of eighty.

“Uh, no?” Tim replied, the words thick on his tongue. He had phrased the answer like a question, and he wasn’t sure why. _Was_ he in a hurry? There must have been a reason he was looking at the clock, but he couldn’t remember what it was. The pain wouldn’t let him think. He was fairly certain he hadn’t scheduled anything for a time he was in class, but at the same time he couldn’t be sure. Everything was a blur to him; everything before the pain suddenly drastically reduced in significance. “Sorry.”

Chris stared at him for a long moment, before giving a slight nod and turning to the class at large. “Alright, if you could just go over the finishing touches, I’ll give you all a couple more minutes. Yes, they will have to be read out loud; no, nobody will know which one belongs to whom. Focus, now.”

Tim had written nothing, of course, and even as Chris stood up and began walking towards him he found he couldn’t do anything to make himself seem like a normal human being. He sat rigidly, staring at Chris as he came closer, unable to move his facial expression into anything that might be expected from the situation. Somewhere in the back of his mind Tim realised that he probably looked like a complete madman, sitting so still with both of his eyes watering, his fists clenched on the surface of the desk. It was a damn shame he could do nothing about it.

“Tim,” Chris said, speaking quietly now. “You don’t look so good.”

“Migraine,” Tim managed to say.

He had to physically force the word out, concentrating on every part of it, and as a result it came out far too slowly for normal speech. Chris frowned in concern.

“Do you get them often?”

“No,” Tim said, leaving the rest unsaid. _Not anymore_.

“If you want to get yourself home, I can take a first copy of this assignment any time before Friday,” Chris said. “I’d take the offer, if I were you. It’s only going to get hotter and brighter today.”

If Tim had had the energy, the mere thought would have been enough to make him groan. He closed his eyes, immediately regretting it – the room pitched around him, and only when Chris’s hand grabbed his shoulder did Tim realise he had almost slid right out of his seat.

“Tim,” Chris said, a note of real worry in his voice now. “Do you need me to call somebody?”

“No!” Tim forced out. “No,” he repeated, trying to say it like a regular person. “Just—vertigo. Shouldn’t have closed my eyes.”

He made himself give a weak laugh, but it sounded more like a sob even to his ears. The last thing he wanted to do was try and find a way to gather all of his things, put them in his bag, stand up, coordinate the bag over his shoulder… each task seemed more monstrous than the last, and it would culminate in the act of walking and ultimately of driving. He knew he shouldn’t drive in the state he was in, but what choice did he have? The alternative was trying to wait it out here, and Tim was all too aware of just how bad it could get. Even as he continued to refuse to accept what this was, he was already thinking ahead, his brain rushing through the worst case scenarios. Would it really be so bad to stumble his way out of the classroom in front of twenty pairs of curious eyes, if the alternative was to be loaded into the back of an ambulance in front of the entire building?

There was a tickle in his throat, persistent and growing to a command. Tim wanted to scream; he might have, but it would have been agonising.

“Should probably, uh, go,” Tim said distantly, putting his pen into his jacket pocket with some difficulty. His hands felt far away from him, and not quite in his direct control – it was like they were attached to marionette strings, and Tim had to somehow move them in the small, specific increments required for such a surprisingly delicate task. “Don’t want to start co—uh, I mean—” He stifled a cough, waiting a moment until he was sure he could speak. “Throwing up everywhere.”

“Do you have a way to get home?” Chris asked. “You won’t try and drive, will you?”

“Nah,” Tim lied. “I can—uh, the bus. Stops basically in front of my house.”

Chris nodded, looking visibly relieved, and Tim felt a flicker of guilt. Stupidly he found himself hoping that Chris wouldn’t look that fact up, for any reason. Tim had no idea if the buses even went to that section of the neighbourhood, and he was fairly positive that no bus came down his street at all. It was enough to make him feel rotten, but he quickly forgot all torments of the conscience when he bent down to try and reach his bag. His head seemed to triple in size, pulse points erupting in pain, the edges of his vision going dark. Nausea rose with it, and Tim fought hard to swallow it back. In doing so he had to sacrifice the control he was forcing on his chest and it fluttered in that telling way – if he let a cough out now he wouldn’t stop, and Tim knew he wouldn’t be able to pass that off as a simple migraine. With reckless urgency he swung the bag up and stumbled to his feet, almost crashing into the desk across the aisle before he righted himself, swaying like a drunk.

“Will you send me a quick email when you get in, Tim?” Chris asked, still looking at him doubtfully. “Even if it’s just one letter, so I know you’ve got home alright?”

“Yeah,” Tim said, the floor rolling under his feet. “Sure.”

The desks were arranged in a fashion common in classrooms, rows of single desks with narrow aisles, and really the layout shouldn’t have provided an obstacle at all. Tim was now seeing double, however, and the pain was quickly shutting down any higher thought he had. The aisles seemed to swim and twist back on themselves, and as Tim slowly made his way through the desks he was reminded of a funhouse he had been in when he had been much younger, when the floor had shifted as he walked across it, and a lighted revolving tunnel had made it seem like the whole place was shifting on its side. Tim had been cautious then, hovering outside the tunnel and looking doubtfully into it, all while other children ran shrieking past, completely unaware of the horror it represented. He had stood there for so long that his mother had sent an attendant in looking for him, and when Tim had seen him picking his way closer he had bolted down the tunnel like all hell had been on his tail. His mother had so wanted him to have a normal day out. He had forced a grin as he returned to her side, answering her questions by implying that he had simply been having too much fun to rush out right away.

The thought made him feel wretched again – wretched for lying to her, wretched for lying to Chris. Somehow he had only gone a few steps. People were staring, and he was going to start coughing soon. How long did he have? The coughs would send him to the floor in this state, no doubt about it. They always did in the end, but in this state it would be an instantaneous thing. There might be blood. Why would there be blood? This was a migraine, not anything else—but then he remembered that it wasn’t a migraine, that that was the lie he was telling others and that he could never tell himself. Tim forced in a slow breath, knowing anything quicker would start the coughs. The door wasn’t too far away now, and while he was aware of the increasing number of eyes on him the pain was making it mercifully difficult to care.

Of course the damn door was closed. Tim hated doors with a passion. When he was feeling fine they were a lingering resentment, but when the pain reared up like this he could quite happily have every door in the country removed and burned. He’d even settle for open stalls in public bathrooms, if it meant that he never had to try and force his alien hand to grip a door handle. It was a trilogy of torture: first the hand-eye coordination needed to put his hand on the door handle, and then the grip required to hold it, and finally the pressure to push the damn thing down. Yes, without a doubt, Tim was of the opinion that every single door handle could go to hell.

This particular door handle was not in hell, however. It was right in front of Tim, and there was no other thing for it. With intense concentration Tim reached out for the handle, his fingers brushing against it the first time. He took a half-step closer, finally managing to close his fingers around it, but the grip was too weak and the effort required to increase it seemed to be beyond him. Taking another slow breath, Tim concentrated on each finger, increasing the grip, and finally he was able to lean on his arm, pushing the handle down increment by agonising increment. The door opened; Tim could have sobbed with relief.

He didn’t bother closing the door again behind him. That was already enough door handles for one day, and he had several more ahead of him.

The hallway outside wasn’t busy, but it wasn’t empty, either. Thankfully the students here had plenty to focus on, hurrying from classroom to office, flipping through notes or talking on phones. None of them were looking for a distraction from the monotony of work, so Tim wasn’t very high on their list of priorities as he headed down the hallway, going as fast as his uneven legs could take him. At least out in the hallway there was a wall to lean against, and while sliding along it was probably fairly conspicuous, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing students had seen on campus. Tim slid along the wall until he reached the short half-flight of stairs, and then he stopped, his hand loosely on the railing, and stared at them in contempt. He had never seen the point in these stairs. It was a half-flight, maybe eight steps, and they were there because some genius had decided to build this particular building on a slight slope. Granted, this slope also allowed the building to have a fairly sizeable basement, useful at this time of the year where tornado warnings were frequent, but at that precise moment in time Tim would have sincerely rather faced down a tornado than these stairs. At least with a tornado, nobody could judge him for simply laying down and giving up. Such defeat wouldn’t look as rational in the face of eight steps.

Tim briefly contemplated throwing himself down them, reasoning that it would be quicker and hurt less, but the argument regarding his barely-suppressed coughing won out. The impact would shake all the restraint from him, and he would never be able to get up. There was no other choice but to take the stairs one at a time, every impact with the next step – no matter how gentle – sending a tremor of pain through his spine and right up into his throbbing head. Students slipped past him, some of them now giving him strange looks.

“Bad hangover?” somebody joked, and Tim wished that was all it was.

The bottom of the stairs mercifully arrived, and Tim quickly calculated the rest of the obstacles in his way. This hall was fine up until the doors, but it was busy enough that Tim thought he could just slip out after someone else had already opened it. Outside there were three steps, but he had parked to the left of the building and that meant he could just walk down the wheelchair ramp and not lose any time. Then there was perhaps thirty seconds’ worth of pathway to walk to the parking lot, but that was at his regular pace, so he could safely say it would take him about three minutes in this state. It would be in direct sunlight, too, which might necessitate adding an extra minute. Then he would have to somehow unlock his car and get in, but it was parked in the shade and that would help momentarily. How he was going to drive in this state he had no idea, but his first priority was his car. At least there, there was a modicum of privacy.

He was in luck – somebody held the door for him on their way in, and Tim managed to make it to the wheelchair ramp without encountering another door handle. Outside the air was close and humid, without a single breeze to bring relief, and Tim was forced to rethink how cool his car would be. He stumbled along as quickly as he could, feet dragging along the floor, the coughs beginning to break from him in stifled grunts that reminded him of listening to his old dog throw up. What had happened to that dog, anyway? Tim vaguely remembered him from when he had been younger, perhaps in the first grade. He was sure the dog had been around for the whole of first grade, but then his memories became dominated by headaches and night terrors he could no longer recall the details of, and then—then something had happened with the dog, but he couldn’t remember what. He remembered a lawn, yellowed from the summer heat, and dark brown, thick and gelatinous. Blood, he knew, but he couldn’t picture the dog. He must have blocked that out, or had he never seen it? He remembered his mother screaming, her sobs driven by something other than grief, and then the hurried murmurs of her voice on the phone in the hallway. _I don’t_ know _, Mom. Yes, I’m sure. Who else? No, he doesn’t remember. I don’t_ know _. What do I do? What should I do with him?_

Then there had been the hospital, and the questions, the endless questions, and Tim remembered that one now. _Do you remember what happened to your dog, Timmy?_ Christ, he had still been _Timmy_ then. What had happened to the dog? Tim at least knew what they _thought_ had happened.

The parking lot crept ever closer, and finally Tim was clawing his way along the side of his car, numb hands fumbling for his keys. His chest was shaking, trembling with the effort of suppressing the coughs; he very nearly dropped the keys, and the close call sent a shock of terror through him. If he had dropped them he knew he would never be able to pick them up again. He’d be stuck here until it was over, probably waking up in the back of an ambulance. He forced himself to focus on the key, to unlock the car. His backpack was in the way, and he unceremoniously chucked it into the car, watching it hit the passenger seat and fall halfway into the footwell. Good enough. Tim began the painstaking task of manoeuvring himself into the car.

No sooner had he sat down did the coughing hit him. He was helpless to it, as he always was – all he could do was keep himself sitting to the side, legs out of the car, bent forward so the blood splattered the ground instead of the inside of his car. There wasn’t much of it yet, but it was there, filling his mouth with an all too familiar metal, the nausea responding in kind. Tim grappled with the panic, reminding himself that it would pass with enough time for him to breathe, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time, even if it would only give him enough breath to start coughing again. His hand had found the handle on the inside of the door, and it seemed to have no trouble with it now; he was gripping it with all the force of his pen earlier, holding onto it as though it were the only thing keeping him anchored.

The coughs passed suspiciously quickly, and Tim knew he only had a matter of minutes to get home. Adrenaline briefly making the process easier, he swung himself into the car, shut the door, and started the engine.

He didn’t remember the drive home. Later he would remember some vague things – being honked at when the light turned green without him noticing, scraping the wheels up the kerb practically the whole way up his street – and when he got out of the car he had enough presence of mind to realise that he was barely on the driveway at all, but that was for him to worry about later. The mailbox was still in place, and that was all that mattered. His biggest worry was getting into the house, which necessitated another round of fumbling with keys and very nearly dropping them; rain was beginning to fall in great fat drops as Tim finally opened the door, stumbling as he did so. He managed to right himself, experienced a brief moment of hope that he might even make it to his bedroom, and then he was aware that his hands seemed even further away from him now, and they were shaking violently, and he couldn’t feel them doing so. The pain had receded, too, and even with the situation being what it was, Tim experienced a moment of relief before the resigned dread hit him. He was no longer a body; he wasn’t sure _what_ he was. Floating somewhere outside himself, free from the pain, watching as the shaking in his hands spread all the way up his arms, down into his legs, and then he fell.

He hit the floor hard, but didn’t feel it. It had been a nasty fall, clear to him even in his current state. He had landed as rigid as a board, and he was aware that he was moving now, hands like claws, his spine arched. Tim continued to watch himself, somehow both through his own eyes and from a distance; vaguely he thought this was probably why people believed so much in demonic possession back in the day. He was certainly doing a decent impression.

Then the pain came back, raw and blinding like this, no boundaries between him and it, and whatever made him Tim shattered at the touch of it.

Fleeting concepts, then; thoughts that were familiar but not his own. Flashes of bright colour, far too saturated, bright enough to make some part of him flinch. He was in the trees, stumbling across rocks, the bubbling of a creek nearby; now he was outside a house he couldn’t recognise even though he knew he should, and somehow he was looking in through the upstairs window. The cold damp of fog on his face, and then the sudden overwhelming heat, coming out from the shade of the trees on a hot day. Thunder rumbled somewhere both close and far; Tim was seven or eight years old, standing in an open expanse of field, trees bordering the edges, his head craned up, lightning flickering through the sky above his head. A dog’s yelp, cut off mid-cry, ambulance sirens, a child screaming, hysterical and inconsolable; Tim recognised the voice but couldn’t place it, saw the child and knew he should know him.

His own hallway, viewed from somewhere close to the ceiling; a figure hunched on the ground, contorted, eyes wide and unseeing. Tim looked at the eyes and didn’t know them, then he was staring out of them. There was something there, standing where he had just been; something familiar and alien, something he could recognise if he tried. He didn’t want to try. The images flickered on the edge of his memory and he knew what he was looking at and then he no longer knew; the pale tilted head, the dark clothing, and why was this man so tall? He was simply standing there, and Tim couldn’t understand why. Had somebody followed him in off the street? Then he was a child again, in the hall no longer, and the same man was standing in the doorway of his hospital room, and Tim’s fingers were bloody from clawing at the walls. The child version of him screamed, and the adult version must have screamed, too, because something jolted him awake even though he wasn’t sure he had been sleeping.

There was no figure in the hallway. The door was wide open, the rain coming down in heavy grey lashes. He could barely see his car in the drive. The floor was wet; something was dripping on him.

“Tim! Tim, come on!”

Someone was crouched over him, but it was a normal someone, a someone with a face. Tim should know the face, but he couldn’t place it. He stared blankly, willing the name to come.

“That’s it, Tim. Do you know where you are? You’re in your hallway. You’ve had a seizure, but you’re coming out of it now. Take it easy, alright?”

Come to think of it, the person was right. Tim recognised his hallway; was suddenly aware of everything he couldn’t see, the rest of the house in relation to it. It was all familiar, but who was this person? Tim looked away and then back again, in the hope a fresh look would jog his memory.

“It’s me,” said the person. “Brian. Do you know who I am?”

The name was like some kind of key; the moment Tim heard it, Brian’s face revealed itself, slotting into his memory with a firmness that made him sincerely wonder how he had ever forgotten. The recognition must have shown on his face, because Brian gave a relieved smile.

“Thought you weren’t going to recognise me, there,” he said, leaning back against his heels. “How are you feeling? That looked like a bad one.”

Tim’s mouth tasted of blood. He could feel it on his face, a fine spray where he had been coughing it up on himself. He swallowed and winced.

“I’ll get you some water,” Brian said. “If you feel up to it, try and sit yourself against the wall.”

Tim nodded, realising that most of his headache had gone. It still lingered at the edges of his head, a slight pressure always threatening to grow worse, and to anyone else it would have probably been fairly debilitating. Compared to the pain from earlier it was nothing; Tim was able to sit up and shuffle back against the wall with ease. The door swung slightly in the sudden wind, but Tim welcomed the breeze. It was cool and fresh, a welcome reprise from the humidity. Thunder rumbled again, growing closer, a long drawn-out roll across the sky, and Tim saw the distant flicker of lightning.

“Here,” Brian said, returning with a glass. “Did you hit your mouth?”

Tim swilled some of the water around in his mouth and forced himself to swallow, not wishing for Brian to see the full extent of the blood that would be there.

“I think so,” he said, surprising himself by how normal his voice suddenly sounded. “It feels like I bit my tongue, maybe. It’s fine. It’s happened before. Always looks worse than it is.”

He poured some of the water onto his hand, rubbing it over his face. His hand came away a murky brown.

“You’re lucky you didn’t choke on it,” Brian said. “Man, that was scary. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Tim said, glad that it wasn’t a lie. “Tired.” He frowned, the thought suddenly occurring to him. “How come you’re here?”

“Ran into your professor on my way out,” Brian said. “He asked if I was waiting on you and mentioned you’d gone home early. Said he was kind of worried because you hadn’t emailed when you said you would. He asked me if I’d mind stopping by to check on you, but by that point I figured I would anyway. Tell me you didn’t drive home.”

“Sure,” Tim said. “Let’s go with that.”

“Tim,” Brian said, before sighing. “I’ll save the lecture for later.”

“Don’t tell Chris,” Tim said. “I promised I wouldn’t.”

“I wish you hadn’t. It’s dangerous.”

“I needed to get home. If this happens in public people get weird about it. I don’t want anyone calling an ambulance; I don’t need one.”

“You should get one of those bracelets,” Brian said, watching closely as Tim carefully got to his feet. “You know the ones – they say that the person suffers from epilepsy, and you can specify when to call an ambulance. Like if your seizure isn’t over within five minutes, call. Something like that.”

“Maybe,” Tim said vaguely. He had never discussed his seizures with Brian, and if he’d had his way he would have never told him about them. Unfortunately for him, they tended to come when they pleased, and it was inevitable that he would have found out. They had been mild before now, and Brian had simply assumed it was epilepsy. Tim saw no reason to correct him.

“Steady,” Brian said, as Tim stumbled. “You need a hand getting upstairs?”

“Gonna crash on the couch, I think,” Tim said, taking a careful step towards the living room. “The way that’s storm’s going. If the sirens go off I don’t want to have to tackle two flights of stairs.”

“Probably wise,” Brian said. He went to close the front door, and then hesitated. “Do you need anything, or…?”

Tim was on the verge of telling him it was fine, he could go, but something stopped him. A vague memory, barely there, the essence of it rather than the details: something else in the house, standing close to where Brian was now, watching. Tim swallowed, tasting metal again.

“You might as well wait out the storm, so long as you don’t mind me not being very gripping company,” he said, trying not to sound too desperate.

To his immense relief, Brian said he didn’t mind at all.


End file.
